Drought dogs region's harvest efforts

Saturday

Jun 29, 2013 at 12:01 AM

By Amy Bickel The Hutchinson News abickel@hutchnews.com

It's not easy - the 16-plus-hour days amid the scorching Kansas sun, along with the worry of breakdowns, of diminishing crop prices and of thunderstorms bringing hail that could stamp out the crop before it can get in the bin.

Yet, with wheat harvest comes a certain magic, even despite the drastically different conditions from east to west.

In south-central Kansas and around Hutchinson, farmers are reaping a bumper crop thanks to timely spring rains and a February snowstorm that left more than two feet of snow. Farmers have realized yields of 50- and 60-plus bushels an acre as the annual harvest begins to wrap up until next year.

However, the story is far different in southwest Kansas, which is in an extreme to exceptional drought. The area is filled with sparse stands of stunted wheat - with some stretches yielding in the single digits.

Moreover, several fields weren't harvested at all.

More than $93 million in indemnity payments have been issued to Kansas farmers by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Risk Management Agency - and almost that entire amount is related to the drought-stressed wheat crop.

Here's a glimpse of the annual rite as combines roll across Kansas in late June:

Biggest week of the year

There are only a few incorporated towns in Kansas smaller than Frederick, population eight.

And there isn't ever much going on.

There is not much left of the Rice County town, after all. A handful of houses still grace the town site. The remains of the old jail still sit amid a small field, which attracted a couple of metal-detector fanatics on this day. A stone monument marks where the First Baptist Church once stood.

Yet, for a few weeks each June, the town swells a little and the streets bustle with activity as semi trucks rumble down the main drag to the elevator, where five employees work each day until well after midnight trying to help farmers get their paychecks safely in the bin.

"We were just counting residents this morning," said Rachel Laymon, who was weighing trucks at the scale house.

It has been busy, she said. It has also been hot. The mercury soared above 100 degrees Thursday afternoon. But harvest, after all, is running a few weeks later than normal.

"Isn't it supposed to rain today?" location manager Jacob Bailey asked his brother, Ethan, 21, who helps during the season, then climbed up on one of the railcars and began loading it with wheat.

They are a week into harvest, which is now more than 50 percent complete. With more rains this spring, it could have been a better harvest. However, Bailey said some producers were calculating yields of 50 bushels an acre.

In addition, the price of wheat is dropping as harvest commences. A vintage chalkboard that advertises Pepsi reads $6.84 a bushel. Before harvest, wheat prices were well over $7 a bushel.

Rained out

Dick Henrichs could smell the rain.

He leaned against the combine header and watched the sky. It had darkened in the west and lightning began flashing as three other combines rolled across a wheat field near the town of La Crosse in Rush County.

The 50-year-old Illinois man had taken a week of vacation as a feed-mill truck driver so he could cross off one of the items on his bucket list - to make a trek across the wheat belt as a hand in the harvest.

"This is something I always wanted to do," he said. "It's the first crew I've ever been on, and it's been really good."

He had started in Oklahoma with La Crosse custom harvester Melvin Schneider's crew of eight boys and planned to head back to his day job this weekend.

However, the thunder boomed ahead and Henrichs began to wonder if his harvest trip was going to end a day early.

A rain is much-needed. The fields are dry, the ponds are dry. But this is wheat country and when the crop is ready, you cut it and hope for no delays, said Virgil Dechant, a retired farmer who owns the field, who had parked his pickup along the road and was watching the brewing storm.

"If we could just keep these thunderheads away," he said, adding that's especially true with a decent crop in the field, which had been averaging 50 bushels an acre on his wheat ground planted after summer fallow. "We want to get this done."

Nevertheless, he added, "this is western Kansas. You have to be prepared for anything."

Schneider, who also farms and lives near La Crosse, gave commands to his crew as he watched the storm roll in. The last load of wheat had a test weight of 61 pounds a bushel, or No. 1 grade wheat. A rain could lower test weights and delay the harvest.

"I hope there is no hail," he told Henrichs and other employees as they continued to bring in the wheat.

"Just a 20 percent chance of rain, I think they got that wrong," a combine driver hollered back on the radio.

Then raindrops began to fall and Schneider stated the inevitable.

"It looks we are going to get wet," he said.

Can't buy rain

When you're in a drought on the High Plains of Kansas, it's never too early to cut wheat, said Minnesota custom cutter Rick Sugden.

On a normal year, there would be dew on the ground, he said. Some years, the crop doesn't dry down enough until after lunch.

Yet amid a multiyear drought, there's not even dew on this swath of Lane County farmland.

"You could run 24 hours a day, it's so dry," he said.

But he lets his crew get a good night's sleep before they get the combines rolling by 8 a.m. each morning. On this evening, the crew is harvesting near the county seat of Dighton on a field that is yielding between the high teens and mid-20-bushel range. His son and another part of the group are combining near Shallow Water, where the best yields have been around 25 bushels an acre.

Drought has plagued most of Sugden's trip, he said.

"You have these beautiful stands, but they couldn't buy a rain," he said of western Kansas farmers, adding that even a rain cloud that hit some of the region earlier in the afternoon blew by their fields.

His best stop was in Cherokee, Okla., where they cut wheat that averaged around 35 bushels an acre. Everything else has been much less, including a stop in Kiowa that averaged in the 20s.

"They can't take another year of drought," he said of farmers. "There is just nothing left of subsoil moisture; it is totally depleted. They need a major turnaround because there is nothing."

One of the nation's first biomass plants should be completed sometime next year. And, two months ago, southwest Kansas' first dairy processing facility went online, churning out a concentrated milk product used to make Kraft Singles.

Everything seems rosy in this far southwest Kansas town, except for on the dryland wheat ground he stands on, which will make 13 bushels an acre, if that.

It's not even enough to break even, the former Kansas Senate president said. Meanwhile, the outlook seems grim. The area hasn't received more than 5 1/2 inches combined in the past four years. In a normal year, the region receives 17 inches of moisture.

"We need moisture," Morris said of the prolonged drought that is in its fourth year in Stevens County.

Signs of drought are everywhere. You can see it in the short pasture grass and the dusty dirt roads. The horizon seems like a continuous haze filled with the unsettling dirt.

In dry-land wheat fields like Morris', the situation is dire. The wheat stood just a foot tall and thin on the patch he planned to start cutting near Hugoton.

Even the irrigated crop was poor, hit by a string of April freezes.

"Some of the irrigated fields made only 10 bushels an acre," Morris said. "It's all because of the freeze. It is unusual to get freezes like that every week for three or four weeks.

"We couldn't do it without crop insurance," Morris said, but he added that even that has some uncertainty.

The U.S. House failed to pass a farm bill last week, which included strengthened crop-loss measures that would benefit Midwestern farmers like Morris. There is talk that the old farm legislation, already extended one year, could be extended again.

That was a disappointment, he said, adding that maybe it's time to separate the farm part of the farm bill from the food-stamp program - noting the food program is a big reason the measure didn't pass.

However, Morris has more to worry about than lawmaking this week, He still has a few days of harvest left and, at present, he needed to unplug the back of his combine from straw so he could get rolling through the poor stand again.

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